Why characters are the real kings of the Melbourne Cup

The race that stops the nation is also the race that has broken many a champion’s heart. But who needs champions when you have great characters?

It’s true that champions have won Melbourne Cups, but not many. You can count them on your fingers.

In the 163 years since Archer won the first Cup in 1861, barely a dozen winners of the world’s greatest staying handicap qualify as champions remembered outside their own eras.

Of some 150 Cup winners, some were good horses, a few were very good – and plenty were just shrewdly-placed, tough handicappers who got lucky.

For every Carbine, Phar Lap and Rising Fast, there are scores of winners not fit to be named in the same sentence, the sort of local heroes recalled fondly by families and friends of the connections but no one else except sports history gurus like Bruce McAvaney.

Trick question: What did Russia win in 1946? Answer: The Melbourne Cup, in equal record time.

Russia storms home at the 1946 Melbourne Cup.

Russia is forgotten by all but trivia buffs yet he was a better Cup winner than most. A class above Rimfire, the crock who stole the Cup at huge odds two years later when ridden by 15-year-old Mallee kid Ray Neville, whose brothers and sisters wagged school in Birchip to listen to the race on the “wireless”.

The race that stopped a nation didn’t stop country schools in 1948. But after tiny Ray won on Rimfire, the Birchip teacher declared a half-day holiday.

A decade could go past back then without a star winning the Cup, which gave the occasional battler a chance to break into the big time.

These days, the conventional wisdom is that the Cup has become “a good horse’s race” with a field filled with expensive imports.

Maybe the last battler story was in 1999 when the late, great “Cups King” Bart Cummings persuaded the cheaply-bred Rogan Josh to win for Darwin schoolteacher Wendy Green.

Wendy Green owner of Rogan Josh spent months travelling home with the 1999 Melbourne Cup trophy sharing her joy along the way. Picture: Nicole Garmston

Wendy drove the Cup trophy all the way back to the Top End with a crate of champagne in the boot of a dusty sedan. It took a while: she celebrated with everyone she met.

In Tennant Creek, someone asked to use the Cup to “christen” a baby. A bus driver played priest. Holy water was in short supply so they used champagne. Result: up north somewhere there’s a 25-year-old Indigenous bloke whose mates no doubt call him Rogan, or maybe Josh.

Michelle Payne’s tear-jerker win on the Ballarat horse Prince Of Penzance in 2015 is now the compulsory Cup fairytale. But before Michelle (and her brother Stevie, film star strapper) there was the Welsh Kiwi battler Sheila Laxon, the trainer and track rider who pulled off the Caulfield Cup-Melbourne Cup double with Ethereal in 2001.

The much-travelled Sheila, now an honorary Aussie, is back this year with co-trainer husband John Symons and two Cup long shots.

One of their pair is called Mission Of Love, which seemed an omen for romantics right up until race club vets ruled the horse unfit on Friday.

Romantics might also recall Mission Of Love’s well-travelled jockey Nikita Beriman winning the 2007 Emirates Stakes on Tears I Cry at 100-1. Back then, Nikita was better known than the trainer, a country boy called Ciaron Maher. Things change in 17 years.

Laxon wasn’t the first sheila to win the Cup, despite what records say.

In 1938, New Zealand’s only licensed female trainer, Granny McDonald, entered a horse named Catalogue. But because Australian clubs barred female trainers and jockeys then, her husband Allan McDonald was given a temporary licence. When Catalogue won, Allan’s name went into the records.

It wasn’t until Sheila Laxon repeated the feat 63 years later that Granny’s win was officially recognised.

The year after Granny and Catalogue’s triumph was another big one for females as the humble Rivette became the first mare to win the Caulfield Cup-Melbourne Cup double.

Rivette, whose mother Riv had run in unregistered “pony races”, was bred and trained by World War I Digger Harry Bamber. The stake money and his long-odds doubles bets on Rivette set him up for life.

Stories about winners like Rivette, Catalogue and Rimfire are better than the horses were. Same with wartime winner Colonus in 1942. Colonus was a mudlark. By amazing luck a groundsman got drunk and left sprinklers running on the track all night – and then it rained on Cup morning as well.

Colonus led all the way and was met with stony silence by the crowd, who’d backed more fancied horses. But a wise punter, Ted Mayes, won a fortune on him and shortly afterwards used the dough to start the Colvan potato chip factory and so made even more. It’s not the only time a racecourse sprinkler turned mud into money.

That dodgy stuff doesn’t happen any more, although the authorities now deliberately (and sensibly) water the track more than in the past to make the surface easier on imported horses, which have a tendency to break down.

Speaking of track watering, though, the connections of triple Cup sensation Makybe Diva threatened to scratch her if the track wasn’t to her liking before her record-making third win in 2005.

Three-time Melbourne Cup winner Makybe Diva pictured with her strapper Natalie Hinchcliffe. Picture: Mark Stewart

Makybe Diva, conceived in Europe, is a striking example of the elite standard of runners this century compared with when the Cup was strictly a trans-Tasman argument, world-famous but, purists fretted, lacking world-class depth.

This reporter recalls interviewing an old Mallee owner-trainer, “Curly” Burns, with his Cup starter Dry Wine, which he trained by leading from a ute around a wheat paddock. In the same era, the memorable 1983 winner, Kiwi, was trained around the cows on his owner-trainer “Snowy” Lupton’s New Zealand farm.

Now, a quarter of the way into the 21st century, owners and trainers do not have nicknames like Snowy and Curly. And their horses tend to come from far away, not that air miles make them more interesting.

The standard has skyrocketed since horses started getting frequent flyer points but one thing remains true: the Cup is still rarely a champions’ race, even this Tuesday. The scratching of Via Sistina and Jan Brueghal saw to that.

Plenty of champs have tried and failed in the Cup – Tulloch, Gunsynd and Kingston Town for a start, all record stakes earners who faded on the first Tuesday of November. Family Of Man broke Gunsynd’s Australian stake record before handing it to Kingston Town, but even George Hanlon’s magic couldn’t persuade the crack miler, Cox Plate and Derby winner to run past midfield in the Cup.

Likewise the smashing So You Think, a double Cox Plate winner who might have rocked the Valley a third time if he hadn’t been sold overseas. The matinee idol was beaten in the Flemington mud by grinding imported stayer Americain.

Americain now stands at stud for $8000, whereas So You Think is $80,000. That’s the difference between Cup winner and champion.

Another champ who didn’t make it was Dulcify, not as beautiful as So You Think but freakishly talented. He was fatally injured in the 1979 Cup after destroying a Cox Plate field the way Via Sistina euthanised hers last week.

Trying and failing is one thing. But plenty of stars don’t run in the Cup at all – for the same reasons that the wise C. J. Waller ignored grandstand experts and withdrew the superb Via Sistina from next Tuesday’s big race.

Winx at trackwork in 2019. Picture: Getty Images

Waller didn’t run Winx in the Cup for the same reasons. The question facing him in either case: Why take the world’s hottest 2000m galloper and reward astonishingly brilliant wins by throwing her into a gut-buster ordeal against a tag team of 23 desperate opponents?

His answer, with both Winx and Via Sistina, was gentle but firm. They’re better over 2000m, so don’t play them out of position.

Winx’s jockey High Bowman once confided she could have won the Cup on sheer ability, but might have broken her heart doing it.

Waller’s strong 2021 Cup winner, the ill-fated Verry Elleegant, went to Europe and flopped. That probably franks his earlier reluctance to risk sending Winx overseas when it was just as easy for those who fancied the challenge to fly here. Most ducked.

The difference between Waller and the rest of us is that when it comes to who should or shouldn’t run in Melbourne Cups, he knows what he’s talking about. The horse’s welfare comes first.

Inevitably, though, Waller has a full hand of runners again next week, as does that other dairy farmer’s son, Ciaron Maher.

Maher knows that whoever wins has to beat Waller’s Buckaroo (piloted by Joao “Magic Man” Moreira) whose swooping second in the Caulfield Cup is a classic pointer.

But sometimes the patterns of the past whisper to the future. When Onesmoothoperator won the Geelong Cup running away, it was spookily like Media Puzzle winning there in 2002 before the most moving Melbourne Cup win of all. The one when Damien Oliver saluted the heavens for his brother Jason, who’d died after a fall days earlier.

Onesmoothoperator is trained by Brian Ellison from North Yorkshire, but gallops like the fast American stayers in his pedigree. So does fellow English entry Sea King, which won the Bendigo Cup like another smooth operator, indeed.

Whereas Sea King will have England’s fine female jockey, Hollie Doyle, the best lightweight rider on Earth is on Maher’s Okita Soushi. Her name is Jamie Kah and she has the chance to showcase her God-given talent to the world.

Kah’s perfect seat, low and level, minimises wind drag. Over 3200m that means lengths. Still, she has to get past the battle of the brogues between Brian Ellison’s Yorkshire horse and the persistent Irishman Willie Mullins with his second chancers, Vauban and Absurde.

So the race is between England, Ireland, a Brazilian and County Maher. Who needs champions when you’ve got characters?